SAMPLE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS TO HELP STUDENTS
PREPARE FOR THE MID-TERM TEST IN IDST 2850
GLOBALIZATION SINCE 1492
For distribution on October 24, 2007
Test: October 31, two hours
Describe and give the significance of
1. Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian professor of English who achieved
international celebrity in the 1960s and 1970s for his commentaries on the
relationship between media of communications, human perception, and
social organization in a global context. He was greatly influenced by Harold
Innis, the Canadian political economist who studied the role of media in the
creation and operation of empires. McLuhan’s books include the Mechanical
Bride in 1951, the Gutenberg Galaxy in 1962, and Understanding Media in
1964. As Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at the
University of Toronto, McLuhan was particularly interested in the transition
from a culture oriented primarily around print media to one increasingly
dependent on electronic media. He coined many useful phrases such as
“global village” and “the medium is the message” at a time when society
was struggling to absorb the impact of revolutionary devices such as
television, satellite communications, and computers. In his pioneering work
in theories of communication McLuhan drew heavily on the heritage of
empire building in Canada, a polity whose viability has long depended on
the dissemination of information across wide expanses of geography and
across many divides of culture.
2. The Berlin Wall
The Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 by the Soviet-dominated German
Democratic Republic to prevent its own citizens from escaping to the free
market zone of capitalist West Berlin. Germany was divided after the
Second World War between the main powers that had defeated the Nazi
regime of Adolf Hitler. The Berlin Wall became a symbol of the bipolar
politics of the Cold War that divided the global community throughout most
of the second half of the twentieth century. In the Cold War the United
States dominated a sphere of capitalist polities whereas the Soviet Union
stood at the centre of a number of competing polities whose governments
espoused Marxist principles of proletarian internationalism. In 1989 a surge
of popular resistance in Eastern Europe against the continuing reign of
communist authoritarianism led to fall of the Berlin Wall and the
reunification of Germany. The fall of the Berlin Wall proved to be a prelude
to the demise of the Soviet Union two years later. The raising, maintenance
and demolition of the Berlin Wall has symbolized patterns of history whose
global sweep transcends the local politics of a single city.
3. Pierre Dominique Toussaint L’Overature
Pierre Dominique Toussaint L-Overature was a gifted military leader and
law giver who transformed a slave revolt in the French sugar colony of San
Domingo into a revolutionary movement resulting in the creation of the
Republic of Haiti in 1803. The slave revolt in France’s most lucrative colony
began in 1791 when news of the French Revolution and the Declaration of
the Rights of Man began to reach the Caribbean Islands. The Black slaves of
African ancestry at San Domingo believed that the ideals of liberty, equality
and fraternity applied to them as much as to any White European. Toussaint
L-Overature was drawn to this liberation stuggle giving it military discipline
and constitutional articulation. Eventually the Black leader was captured by
the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte, the General who sought to reinstitute
Black slavery in France’s sugar islands. Toussaint L’Overature died of
exposure in a jail in the French Alps in 1802. Nevertheless the movement he
led was sufficiently effective to create Haiti, the second republic of the
Americas. The leadership of Toussaint L’Overature in guiding his people
away from slavery helped inspire many engaged in the struggle to oppose
imperialism and oppression of all kinds. In 1938 the Trinidadian activist
C.L. R. James helped explain Toussaint L’Overature’s accomplishments in
his classic text, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Overature and the San
Domingo Revolution.
2
Other terms that may be the subject of similar short essays
The Atlantic Charter
Polisario
“Africans? Claims in South Africa”
The response of the African National Congress in 1943 to the
Atlantic Charter of 1941
Nike
The Shock Doctrine:
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Steve Biko
Vasco Da Gama
“The Librarian of Basra”
Caste and Class in the governance of British imperial India
3
The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, 2007
Ja-hi-lee-ya
Nelson Mandela and his ideal of a deracialized economy
Mecca and Islam
Global apartheid
Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler
The Model-T Ford and the Volkswagon
Patrice Lumumba
The military-industrial complex
“merciless Indian savages” and the Declaration of Independence
Dr. Mohamed Elmasry
4
Canada’s policy of multiculturalism, 1971
Omar Khadr
The apparent bending of time and space through innovations in
communications technology
5